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Perhaps the vendors that have been trumpeting the "value" of all of these extra UVs haven't' finished up their new characters for the latest batch of UVs. After all, they have been quite busy here telling everyone the value of them, so I do expect them to show the added "value" of the latest UVs.
Like most of the characters here, the ones released so far for Belle & Brodie look generic to me. but Male3dia does tend to make distinctive characters, give him a little time.
I skipped Brodie, I already made teens. ;)
Let's see if I get this right: neither Josie nor Jayden have specific UV's but Belle and Brodie do. If this is the case, why?
I can not see the issue with Belle and Brodie having their own UV's. Whilst I agree that there seems little point to it, it is also 99% likely that only their own character will ever use these UVs, so no one should own a skin that needs these UVs unless they actually own the character that adds them. If the custom UV gives some minor improvement to the one texture that uses it, then I guess that is a good thing, no?
I think the point is more the inverse - here we have two brand new characters with custom UVs, and a semi-major product launch... yet the only support I've seen for the UV maps so far are been the Amazing Skins and RedSpec Octane add-ons. If DAZ couldn't get B6 UV based characters in the actual product bundles, then it seems pretty apparent that no one got on the B6 UV train.
Personally, I have no problem with every single skin coming with a custom UV set.... in fact, for the technical reasons that have been droned on about here I'd actually prefer it. But only provided that the UV set in question comes with that skin or is made freely available elsewhere. It's the requirement to have to buy X character to buy a completely different skin that has kept me from buying certain products in the past, and that, I suspect, has hurt the sales of a lot of otherwise great looking products. However, when not even DAZ is trying to support not one but TWO new UVs, it seems there can't be that many PAs left who're willing to keep drinking the UV kool-aid.
...I actually ended up with the Mei Lin base figure only because she was discounted at 75% of (most likely a "glitch") during the PC Sale and I had the 2$ Twitter coupon, so I got her for a grand total of 8.07$
Nice to see that the Zahara character uses the base G2 UV (though you do need the Belle body shape for the character head and body morphs) for I do like the skin texture and the flutterby tats.
I finally picked up the Gianni and Giselle Starter Bundles for about $14 each. Just as I expect that I'll eventually get Lee, Mei Lin and Brodie when there's a similar deal. Belle... I'm more tempted to pick up sooner, just because I do a lot of work with teens and I'd end up getting most of the clothing and hair in her bundles anyway.
...yeah was also finally able to get Giselle and Steph along with Iridessa and Naaru for Giselle (nice youthful fey) and the Slender Steph morphs.
Petty much meh on Belle, like her face, but not her physique. looks too much like a "Mini Vicky".
Much more interested in Brodie as I feel he looks better and I don't have a male teen in the G2 gene pool yet.
May pick up the Zahara character mainly for the skin and tattoo options as they are based on the G2F UV. The head and body morphs apparently require the Belle head and body shape.
You know this is an interesting topic for me. I think the uv's and morphs in general being versatile depends on who the user of Daz Studio is. For instance:
1. I stick with Genesis 1, and, right now am using Giselle 6 textures on, first converted to V4 then converted to my own UV map for farther editing (this was a map based off of the shape I made genesis into).
2. I modeled the shape of Genesis into what I desired first. Applied the texture I made in step one. If things didn't fall where I wanted them to on the mesh I moved around the topology of the morph so that it did (instead of messing with the texture like most people do). This way I never have to edit the actual texture for moving Eyebrows, Lips, and nips etc., they are right where they are supposed to be on my own design.
Explaining this method to someone on the ground level would be impossible, but, knowing it knocks down all the walls of modeling or using any character within the Genesis figure. Yes I do use outside software to do all this the combination of which makes everything easier for me but more complex for most.
Another thing is this:
Daz Studios texture transfer isn't perfect, and, I use outside software for that. And The transfer tool or Gen X isn't perfect as well only a good starting point.....sometimes.. That being said, Genesis can replicate any other base mesh with a little work if the technician operating Daz Studio and other programs has the knowledge to do so.
I know this isn't helping the masses here but Simply I will say this.... Anything is possible using a single base mesh with geografting.
...what other software do you use?
I wanted to ask about UV's and Lee 6 - nothing i have seems to work on him except his stuff. the shoulder areas are a nightmare. my surface pulldowns say i can use hiro 5 textures, but those simply don't match up.
am i missing something or is there a problem with Lee?
I was looking for information on creating alternate uv's for my own use when I stumbled across this thread and just got pullled in. So much so I read the whole thread.
I hadn't realised that there was so many people not happy with the use of alternate uv's either for the cost of buying them or not enough use of them. There were some really sensible solutions for this problem made, for example including them in the product that uses them or providing them free.
Some things that really stuck out for me though were some of the comments about what sells and what doesn't.
A bit of history first, I started with Gen3 where each character had to have morphs and clothing separately bought and also skins unless it was a pack which included morphs for more than one character.
Then we went Gen4 where we had V4 who could have additional morphs for G4 and S4 etc...I don't remember any alternate uv packs with these characters but maybe I've forgotten hopefully if there were some one will mention it. Clothing had to be bought for the original character and also the unimesh shapes....remember that?
Then we had genesis which imho is the most versatile of all these models and before someone tells me how vendors can't make female clothes for an androgynous figure, I suggest they have a look at some of the clothing actually made...there was some great female clothing created for them. During this era only one set of each morph or clothing had to be bought as Genesis(the system) could adapt clothing to fit and we had a unisex figure that could use legacy content from Gen3 and Gen4.
Then we had Genesis2 which was two separate figures and all the character sets that go with it for the different sexes and all that goes with that. Most of you know what is need to be able to use Gen2 fully... I won't rehash it.
Sorry for rambling on but I think the history helps explain my perspective a little bit. As a hobbyist I have spent a small fortune over the years and I have a huge runtime like many others. I have developed skills that allow me to adapt and create items for my use. This has made me a lot pickier over what I will actually buy. I realised about 2 years ago that I was no longer Daz's optimal customer. No harm or foul in that...it's a business and they need to make a profit to continue running.
IMO, their optimal customer is someone who is fairly new to 3D or someone who wants to have a quick way to make art. Who wants to be able to make art by simply pointing and clicking. People like me who kit bash to achieve a particular result aren't going to spend as much money as someone who doesn't. They are going to check their runtime to see what they have and whether they can adapt it to do what they want.
When I first started in 3D having products that I could simply load and shoot was fantastic. I could get results quickly and easily...vendors had done all the work for me. Once I started to have a particular vision that I wanted to create the need arose for me to adapt or create my own. The simple reason being that what I wanted no vendor would make as it wasn't financially viable. That is cool also...many of them struggle to make ends meet or have to work more than one job.
In regards to alternate uv's it appears from comments made earlier in the thread that many vendors try to maximise their profits by focusing on readily available uv's this makes great business sense. Some may find this hard to accept from an artistic point of view but the reality is that many hobbyists will not notice the small inperfections in using the standard uv with a morphed character and others like myself will rarely use a prepackaged morph but will spin dials to create a unique character.
I know that I will not buy a base character simply for the ability to use one texture...it would require 4-5 texture sets or characters for that base to even begin to make it worth my while.
In regards to hardship and it not being something a vendor should consider...a vendor should know their customer base and what they are willing to spend. If they make a product that is too expensive for their customers it won't sell. Vendors may have information on how much they have sold but they don't have information on missed sales due to requirements of having a particular product. The more products a new product requires the less likely I am to buy it unless I already own those products. I would imagine that is fairly common...
I loved your comment...the more skilled the user is the less reliant on purchased products they are. Personal growth and learning of new skills is always great!
Sorry for all the rambling...
Pen
Well, seeing that we have now had multiple figures come out where the UV set has never been used except on the base, I suspect that that's going to be the way it plays out for the rest of G2F and G2M.
...I dread what will happen when G3 comes out.
I am very glad to read this thread, as I would have been very very irritated getting G2 figures with one-off uv maps.
Right now, I'm mostly sticking with Genesis 2 stuff that plays nicely and Genesis 1. I've been experimenting and it seems to me I can capture a wide range of ethnic variations just using the morph packages for G2 and the ethnic packages and morphs for Genesis 1, so... yeah.
Odds are that the base G3 shapes will ship with the V6/M6 UVs and then there'll be new UVs for V7/M7. Within a month or so, though, there'll probably be a V4 UV set and eventually one for M4. I doubt that there will ever be UV sets for many of the other G2 figures, but we'll probably see some for the Gen 5 figures.
Sorry to thread necro, but I was looking up the subject of multiple UV maps and came across this.
As a character morph developer, let me step in here a moment.
Poser users requested that V4 have a mappable eyebrow after V3 didn't have one, it even says so in V4's own docs. V4's implementation was painstakingly done within the limits of Poser 4's capabilities in such a way as to prevent relying on a forced geometry like V2 had, but had two dealbreaking impracticalities which resulted in its disuse:
1. eyeBrow duplicated the entire skinHead's UV map, which meant a suitably high-res map would be in the neighborhood of 17,000x17,000 pixels (present day Poser 10 on a 16Gb Mac balks at 9000x9000 regardless of compression or image format). The reasoning behind not cropping the UV map was probably to simplify positioning but a properly cropped overlay UV map with the tops of the eyes for reference would have solved that problem. Poser's current materials editor allows me to do this easily.
2. eyeBrow is a conforming object like clothing, but lacking a conforming object's joint-based synchrony to its parent. DAZ ingeniously did an end run around that by post-processing the code of every head-related dial and INJ pose to include a secondary matching morph target for eyeBrow to keep it snug to the head mesh. The technique's as fragile as it's clever, though: additional morph targets not provided by DAZ don't come with a secondary eyeBrow morph to retain the snug fit. To keep that conforming object viable, DAZ would have had to bundle with V4 a Python script that did the same conversion of custom head morph targets to dual-morph INJ pose files. For what it's worth I've written proof of concept code for doing this, but it only outputs eyeBrow .obj morph targets and not delta-compressed INJ .pz2s (yet).
It didn't die because people preferred pasting eyebrow transparencies onto skinHead's diffuse map, eyeBrow died because it was too complicated to sustain / limited return on investment compared to eyelash transparency maps.
...which left us with the eyebrows painted on the facial skin map rather than being a separate MAT zone which in turn does not allow for matching eyebrow to hair colour.
The only workaround is a tedious one which involves modifying the skin map in a 2d application.
As a character morph developer, let me step in here a moment.
Poser users requested that V4 have a mappable eyebrow after V3 didn't have one, it even says so in V4's own docs. V4's implementation was painstakingly done within the limits of Poser 4's capabilities in such a way as to prevent relying on a forced geometry like V2 had, but had two dealbreaking impracticalities which resulted in its disuse:
1. eyeBrow duplicated the entire skinHead's UV map, which meant a suitably high-res map would be in the neighborhood of 17,000x17,000 pixels (present day Poser 10 on a 16Gb Mac balks at 9000x9000 regardless of compression or image format). The reasoning behind not cropping the UV map was probably to simplify positioning but a properly cropped overlay UV map with the tops of the eyes for reference would have solved that problem. Poser's current materials editor allows me to do this easily.
2. eyeBrow is a conforming object like clothing, but lacking a conforming object's joint-based synchrony to its parent. DAZ ingeniously did an end run around that by post-processing the code of every head-related dial and INJ pose to include a secondary matching morph target for eyeBrow to keep it snug to the head mesh. The technique's as fragile as it's clever, though: additional morph targets not provided by DAZ don't come with a secondary eyeBrow morph to retain the snug fit. To keep that conforming object viable, DAZ would have had to bundle with V4 a Python script that did the same conversion of custom head morph targets to dual-morph INJ pose files. For what it's worth I've written proof of concept code for doing this, but it only outputs eyeBrow .obj morph targets and not delta-compressed INJ .pz2s (yet).
It didn't die because people preferred pasting eyebrow transparencies onto skinHead's diffuse map, eyeBrow died because it was too complicated to sustain / limited return on investment compared to eyelash transparency maps.
And despite all that, the reality was that the eyebrow was never used in either V3 or V4 by enough people to even make it economical, so it was eliminated in later versions of figures. My comment still stands on eyebrows being a determining factor of how a character looks, based on my being a PA selling characters in this and other stores for over 6 years.
I wouldn't expect the eyebrow to make a re-emergence, but generally you can remove the brow area, with a little use of a graphics editing program to clone out those areas and replace it with your own eyebrows if you wish to change them.
As a character morph developer, let me step in here a moment.
Poser users requested that V4 have a mappable eyebrow after V3 didn't have one, it even says so in V4's own docs. V4's implementation was painstakingly done within the limits of Poser 4's capabilities in such a way as to prevent relying on a forced geometry like V2 had, but had two dealbreaking impracticalities which resulted in its disuse:
1. eyeBrow duplicated the entire skinHead's UV map, which meant a suitably high-res map would be in the neighborhood of 17,000x17,000 pixels (present day Poser 10 on a 16Gb Mac balks at 9000x9000 regardless of compression or image format). The reasoning behind not cropping the UV map was probably to simplify positioning but a properly cropped overlay UV map with the tops of the eyes for reference would have solved that problem. Poser's current materials editor allows me to do this easily.
2. eyeBrow is a conforming object like clothing, but lacking a conforming object's joint-based synchrony to its parent. DAZ ingeniously did an end run around that by post-processing the code of every head-related dial and INJ pose to include a secondary matching morph target for eyeBrow to keep it snug to the head mesh. The technique's as fragile as it's clever, though: additional morph targets not provided by DAZ don't come with a secondary eyeBrow morph to retain the snug fit. To keep that conforming object viable, DAZ would have had to bundle with V4 a Python script that did the same conversion of custom head morph targets to dual-morph INJ pose files. For what it's worth I've written proof of concept code for doing this, but it only outputs eyeBrow .obj morph targets and not delta-compressed INJ .pz2s (yet).
It didn't die because people preferred pasting eyebrow transparencies onto skinHead's diffuse map, eyeBrow died because it was too complicated to sustain / limited return on investment compared to eyelash transparency maps.
Victoria 3 did have eyebrows - limited in extent to the eyebrow area (and not meeting in the middle for werewolf and other special-needs characters). Victoria 4 on launch didn't have any kind of eyebrow overlay - a lot of us (quite possibly including you) complained and Victoria 4.1 added thee existing eyebrow layer covering the entire forehead, as a separate body part to avoid breaking morphs already released for 4.0.